The New Deal: Anticipating a Federal Education Policy.

Overview & Synopsis

A history of Roosevelt's New Deal education policies shows that the Depression of the 1930s led to unprecedented experimentation in federal educational programs. Three aspects of New Deal education policy are important. First, the New Deal set precedents that redefined and legitimized the federal government's role in education. Working through structures parallel to traditional education--such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the National Youth Administration (NYA)--the federal government constructed schools, helped employ teachers, and offered a wide variety of courses. Second, the New Deal demonstrated the necessity and the effectiveness of federal intervention for the education of blacks and other educationally deprived groups. The CCC, WPA, NYA, and other programs emphasized the training of blacks, though often in segregated circumstances. Third, however, the New Deal failed to institutionalize its new policies. Thus it built no group of professional educators committed to federal participation in education. The New Deal's experiments in educational policy did help establish new ideas about federal responsibility for education and new goals for equal and democratic education. (Author/RW)